by Saul Bellow
Facts that Put Fancy to Flight
(1962)
The New York Times Book Review, 11 February 1962.
I have read somewhere that in the early days of the movies, a miner in Alaska rushed at the screen to batter down the villain with his shovel. Probably he was drunk, but his action was significant nevertheless. This man had considered it a practical thing to travel thousands of miles into a frozen wilderness to dig for buried treasure. Money, land, furs, jewels, champagne, cigars, silk hats, he must have accepted as legitimate objects of the imagination. Yet there was no place in his mind for this new sort of transaction. It evidently seemed to him that if the fellow had taken the trouble to tie the kicking heroine to the tracks, he must mean business. His imagination could conceive only of real objects. Thus with the selfsame shovel he dug for gold and swung at shadows.
Few people make this error in so primitive a form, but almost no one is altogether free from it. We understand, of course, that art does not copy experience but merely borrows it for its own peculiar purposes. Americans, however, do not find it always simple to maintain the distinction. For us the wonder of life is bound up with literal facts, and our greatest ingenuity is devoted to the real. This gives reality itself magical and even sacred properties and makes American realism very different from the European sort. With us the interest of the reader and often of the writer, as well, is always escaping toward facts.
The nonfactual imagination also returns to facts. Ask a woman to describe her son, and she is likely to tell you with pride that he is six feet two or three inches tall and weighs two hundred twenty pounds, that his shoes are size fourteen, and that he eats four eggs at breakfast and two pounds of steak at a sitting. Her love, in short, frequently takes a statistical form. Years ago, in Chicago, I used to listen to a Negro virtuoso, Facts-and-Figures Taylor, who entertained shouting crowds in Washington Park by reciting the statistics he had memorized in the public library. “You want to know what the steel industry exported in nineteen and twenty-one? You listen to this, now.”
“You tell ’em, Facts-and-Figures. Give ’em hell!”
People who are not particularly friendly to art may be reconciled to it by factual interests—descriptions of the stretching or priming of the canvas and the method of applying the paints, the dollar value of the picture. One thinks more kindly of a painting valued at ten thousand dollars, the original factory colors dripped from a six-inch brush, than of one that has not applied to the prevailing form of the imagination for consideration. The theatergoer may be pleased to learn that behind the living room represented on the stage are fully furnished bathrooms or kitchens, which will never be seen but are there to give a reassuring sense of completeness or closure. The imitation will be absolutely genuine. Because we have a strong taste for the solid background, for documentation, for accuracy, for likeness, we are often confused about the borders between art and life, between social history and fiction, between gossip and satire, between the journalist’s news and the artist’s discovery.
The demands, editorial and public, for certified realities in fiction sometimes appear barbarous to the writer. Why this terrible insistence on factual accuracy? “Our readers will want to know,” an editor will sometimes say, “whether your information is correct.” The research department will then make inquiries. How many stories does the Ansonia Hotel really have, and can one see its television antenna from the corner of West End Avenue and Seventy-second Street? What do drugstores charge for Librium? What sort of mustard is used at Nedicks? Is it squeezed from a plastic bottle or applied with a wooden spoon?
These cranky questions will be asked by readers, compulsively. Publishers know they must expect their errors to be detected. They will hear not only from the lunatic fringe and from pedants but from specialists, from scholars, from people with experience “in the field,” from protective organizations and public relations agencies, from persons who have taken upon themselves the protection of the purity of facts.
Archaeologists and historians are consulted by movie producers in the making of Roman spectaculars. As long as the chariots are faithful copies, the fire real Greek fire, it seems to make little difference that the dialogue makes you clutch your head, that the religious theme is trumped up with holy music and cunning lights. It presently becomes clear that the protagonist is not Ben-Hur, not Spartacus, but Know-How. Art based on simple illusion is art in one of its cruder forms, and it is this that Hollywood with its technical skill has brought to perfection.
The realistic method made it possible to write with seriousness and dignity about the ordinary, common situations of life. In Balzac and Flaubert and the great Russian masters, the realistic externals were intended to lead inward. I suppose that one might say that now the two elements, the inward and the external, have come apart.
In what we call the novel of sensibility, the intent of the writer is to pull us into an all-sufficient consciousness, which he, the writer, governs absolutely. In the realistic novel today, the writer is satisfied with an art of externals. Either he assumes that by describing a man’s shoes he has told us all that we need to know about his soul, or he is more interested in the shoes than in the soul. Literalists who write to the editor are rather odd and amusing people who do not need to be taken too seriously, but the attitude of the writer himself toward externals is a serious matter.
The facts may excite a writer deeply, and in America we have a poetry of fact—the details of labor in Walt Whitman, the knowledge of navigation in Mark Twain, the descriptions of process in Hemingway’s fishing stories. But in every case it is the writer’s excitement that counts. Without this excitement, the facts are no more interesting than they would be in a manual of river navigation or a Sears Roebuck catalogue. What is happening now is that the intrinsic excitement of the facts themselves has become intense, and the literary imagination must rival the power of the real. In the U.S.A. today, the facts appear to have it all over the imagination.
The American desire for the real has created a journalistic sort of novel, which has a thing excitement, a glamour of process; it specializes in information. It resembles the naturalistic novel of Zola and the social novel of Dreiser but is without the theoretical interests of the first and is unlike the second in that it has no concern with justice and no view of fate. It merely satisfies the readers’ demand for information. It is literal. From this standpoint it may sometimes be called an improving or a moral sort of book. However, it seldom has much independent human content, and it is more akin to popularized science or history than to the fiction of Balzac or Chekhov. It is not actively challenged by the “novel of sensibility.”
The living heirs of Henry James and Virginia Woolf do not do very well, and I’m afraid that they largely deserve their neglect. In their desire for mental independence and aesthetic sensibility, they have receded altogether too far from the externals. They give very little information; and after we have visited them in their tree houses once or twice, they lose their charm.
The novel in America has taken two forms, neither satisfactory. Those writers who wish to meet the demand for information have perhaps been successful as social historians, but they have neglected the higher forms of the imagination. The novel of sensibility has failed to represent society and has become totally uninteresting.
It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.
By now it is misleading to speak of the facts as if they were soluble, washable, disposable, knowable. The facts themselves are not what they once were and perhaps present themselves to the imagination of the artist in some new way. A. J. Liebling, in an uncommonly good article on Stephen Crane (The New Yorker, 5 August 1961), writes: “We have seen in our time that the best w
riters as they mature become journalists—Sartre, Camus, Mauriac, Hemingway.” Are we to suppose, therefore, that the artistic imagination must be sent back into the world and its realities? Does the challenge of journalism in our time carry us higher than that of art?
Some of our novelists can scarcely help being better fact-bringers than artists. They are turning ground that has never been turned before—the army, the laboratory, the modern corporation, the anarchic sexual life of “free spirits”: such phenomena in the raw state are not quickly assimilated into art. Moreover, it’s hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.
The novelist, convinced that the novel is the result of his passionate will to know everything about the life of another human being, finds that he must get through the obstacles of the literal to come at his subject. Thus he is prevented from doing the essential thing. Hard knowledge is demanded of him; to acquire this knowledge, he must at least temporarily transform himself into some sort of specialist.
The greatest of the realists always believed that they owed a very special debt to truth. “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the strength of my soul, whom I have tried to set forth in all his beauty, and who has always been, is, and always will be the most beautiful, is—the truth.” So wrote Tolstoy at the conclusion of “Sevastopol in May.” And Dostoyevsky, commenting on Anna Karenina, tells us that he found the book at times very monotonous and “confined to a certain caste only” and that as long as it was merely a description of life in society, it made no great claim to any deeper interest.
But later he says, “in the very center of that insolent and petty life there appeared a great and eternal living truth, at once illuminating everything. These petty, insignificant and deceitful beings suddenly became genuine and truthful people worthy of being called men.”
That is, after all, what the novelist wants, isn’t it?
White House and Artists
(1962)
The Noble Savage 5, 1962.
One of the editors of The Noble Savage, because the magazine has made so important a contribution to American culture, was invited to attend a White House dinner in honor of M. André Malraux, the French minister of culture, and to mingle with two hundred writers, painters, actors, musicians, and administrators and patrons of the arts. In this crowd TNS’s representative saw several novelists and poets at one time strongly alienated, ex-intransigents, former enemies of society, old grumblers, and lifelong manger dogs, all having a hell of a good time, their faces beaming, their wives in evening gowns (could they afford them?). Readers who remember H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, with its apes, dogs, and horses changed by the mad surgeon into approximately human forms, have only to think of these same creatures in formal dress (black tie) to get a bit of the flavor.
Casting back in history for a parallel, one wit spoke of the Jacksonian horde trampling the White House furniture (a proto-Beat occasion). A few old-time Washington matrons might have been ready to agree. But this was not in the least a Beat evening. It was square. Even the drunks were well behaved, though at the end of the evening the Schubert trio seemed to be getting to them, and some were tapping the time on their neighbors’ knees. There was nothing Jacksonian about the planning and the protocol, the marines in braid, the butlers, the dance orchestra that played a sort of Catskill-intercourse music. Only Adlai Stevenson preserved a shade of intellectual irony. Everybody else seemed absurdly and deeply tickled. Mark Rothko whispered privately to me that of course all this was a lot of crap and meant nothing to him. “But my sister!” he said.
“Where is she?”
“Home with the kids. But absolutely beside herself with excitement. It’s a great day for my sister.”
What he really meant was “If Mama could only see me now.”
Several old lions, accustomed to first honors always, spoke to no one but swept through the crowd with an extraordinary brazen fixity of expression, demanding recognition. At the other extreme were some humble souls who confessed a little brokenly that they were not worthy. A few writers, among them veterans of the Popular Front and believers in the upgrading of the masses, declared that a new era was beginning. The American presidency, for so many years sewed up in long Johns, a rube presidency, was at last becoming modern. Henceforth the country would respect culture. Others, more skeptical, said that Mr. Kennedy was getting ready to exploit the eggheads. He could get them cheap, and they were falling all over themselves. The government could then show the world that it was an enlightened government, that it knew how to encourage the arts, and that American Philistinism was a thing of the dead past. But the real truth, said the grumblers, was that Congress and the administration, though willing to fork over millions of dollars to oil companies in the form of depletion allowances or to cranberry growers to keep up their bogs, would not put up a cent to build a cultural center in Washington. All that dough for Billie Sol Estes and not a penny for singers and playwrights. But Congress has always taken a low view of the arts. Congress would have filled the White House with hog callers or stag shows. Now, grudgingly, it had given the land for a new cultural center but left the raising of funds to the benevolent rich. Finally, these critics declared, the Congress is representative—it does represent the mind, the spirit, and the feelings of the people. Why should painters and writers then lend themselves to schemes designed to conceal the true state of things?
My own feeling was that if the government really did intend to seduce and exploit American artists, it might do these artists little harm. The hand of the seducer obviously made their hearts beat faster and put a fine glow into their cheeks.
Mr. Kennedy’s after-dinner speech was very witty, and a witty president is worth more to artists than a congressional pork barrel. M. Malraux, an impressive-looking man, spoke in greater earnest, saying that America had not sought imperial power and dominion. In private, Mr. Edmund Wilson exclaimed irascibly, in the tones of Mr. Magoo, “Hooey!” There was an American empire! I felt it would be a pity to waste Mr. Wilson’s fine rumblings on a lousy republic and that his eccentricities deserved at least an imperial setting. But putting it all together again—the Philippines, Latin America, the failed Cuban invasion, the sins of Aramco, the haste with which Germany was reconstructed, the fascinating history of Chiang Kai-shek—I couldn’t believe that we were ready to claim elevation to the rank of empire.
But this is the sort of quibble it takes a left-wing sectarian to appreciate. When Russia invaded Finland, the Trotskyites and the splinter Ohlerite faction suffered nearly as much as the Finns, but from another cause. They could not agree about the character of the Soviet state. Was this an imperialist invasion? Could a degenerated workers’ state wage an imperialistic war? Can such questions of definition really matter much? Did Augustus Caesar have a stockpile of atomic bombs? Can an American name be worked into the list of imperial personalities—Augustus, Charles V, Napoleon, Gladstone even? Do we dare to add the name of Eisenhower? Kennedy?
Is it to be Emperor Kennedy, then? Well, that is a title to interest poets and artists and philosophers in a different fashion. Poor Descartes died because Queen Christina of Sweden, a Spartan blue-stocking, had him up at dawn to give her lessons in mathematics. He was accustomed to lie abed until noon. There he had always done his best work. Pushkin complained about the czar, but then the czar took him seriously enough to oppress him, which is more than the American government cares to do for its writers. Voltaire quarreled with Frederick the Great, but it was perhaps to his credit that he could not make out with that militaristic Kraut. Ezra Pound suffered terrible miseries until he turned up his own dubious Caesar. If Mr. Wilson is right about the American empire, we must think through the whole thing again, and think mo
re clearly. What is to be done? How shall we behave toward the mighty in Washington?
Boswell and Johnson throw some light on this matter. Johnson was honored by the king, who engaged him in private conversation in the library at the Queen’s House. “His Majesty approached him, and at once was courteously easy,” says Boswell. When the king complimented him handsomely, Johnson made no reply, explaining later: “It was not for me to bandy civilities with my sovereign.” To the king’s questions about one Dr. Hill, Johnson answered “that he was an ingenious man, but had no veracity.” Urged to say more, he declined to louse up Dr. Hill. “I now began to consider that I was depreciating this man in the estimation of his Sovereign, and thought it was time for me to say something that might be more favorable.”
Boswell relates that Oliver Goldsmith was lying on the sofa during all the time in which Johnson was telling of his meeting with the king, “fretting with chagrin and envy at the singular honor Dr. Johnson had lately enjoyed. At length the frankness and simplicity of his natural character prevailed. He sprung from the sopha, advanced to Johnson, and in a kind of flutter, from imagining himself in the situation which he had just been hearing described, exclaimed, ‘Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should have done; for I should have bowed and stammered through the whole of it.’”
This is the sort of thing that may happen in a fairly easygoing monarchy tending toward the constitutional form. But what happens in a large bureaucratic society? In the Han dynasty, men of letters became functionaries, and the state passed into the long torpor of orthodoxy and dogmatism. A better understanding between writers and the imperial state has its dangers. I can foresee a bureaucratic situation, partly created by men of letters, in which the very call girls (who owe so many of their privileges to the federal tax structure) would be required to pass civil service examinations administered by poets!